NSO and Roderick Cox: Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich
National Symphony Orchestra
Roderick Cox, conductor
Sae Yoon Chon, piano Dublin International Piano Competition Winner 2018
Ravel Pavane pour une infante défunte
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1
Shostakovich Symphony No. 5
Two astonishing young talents – pianist Sae Yoon Chon and conductor Roderick Cox – promise new insights into a piano concerto of surging romance, a thrilling powerhouse symphony, and the most fragile and beautiful of musical fantasies.
Winner of the 2018 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, American Roderick Cox has been praised as a conductor who is ‘paving the way’ (NBC News) and hailed as a ‘trailblazer… a conductor who will be amongst the vanguard’ (Minnesota Star Tribune).
One of the most outstanding young pianists to emerge onto the international scene in recent years, South Korean Sae Yoon Chon was a hugely popular First Prize winner of the 2018 Dublin International Piano Competition.
Ravel’s watercolour-delicate Pavane pour une infante défunte (Pavane for a Dead Princess) is a fantasy for a lost age of refinement and poise, dexterously evoking the slow, processional quality of a dance popular in Europe’s royal courts of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Tchaikovsky’s heart-on-sleeve First Piano Concerto boasts an instantly memorable, pulse-quickening opening, quoted in everything from television advertisements and video games to Hollywood movies and Monty Python. What follows is a thrilling journey through the corkscrew affairs of the heart.
An exercise in political expediency designed to deflect criticism meted out by his Soviet overlords, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony is as defiant as it is conciliatory. The result is altogether bracing, shifting between shadow-cast despair, rousing defiance and sun-lit exuberance.
Presented by National Symphony Orchestra